First question, before I get into all the questions... Say there's some default imap installed from the distribution. If you install one of the non-default offerings (Cyrus, Courier, Dovecot), do they just replace the imapd, imaps, pop3d, etc. executables with the exact same name? Or should xinetd now be starting some process called Courier or Dovecot, and have imapd (for example) disabled? To put that another way, if I see something called imapd, is that ALWAYS the original, default imap daemon (what is that anyway... the University of Washington version?), or could it be a replacement that just uses the generic process label for convenience? I'm using SUSE 10.1 if that makes a difference to anything. So, fetchmail fetches from my ISP. Postfix places the incoming mail in ~/Maildir/. Then Dovecot... well, we're not sure. I did minimal configuring, so far, 'cuz: a) I don't really know what I'm doing and b) they say the defaults should suffice for basic setups. Over on my iBook, I direct the MacOS Mail program to connect to 192.168.1.60 143 (the plain, non-ssl imap port on the SUSE box). It complains. To see if Dovecot is even pretending to serve on port 143, I open a terminal on the iBook and telnet to the same address. Dovecot answers. Woohoo! It wants a login. NOT my userid (which is the same on both machines), and NOT root. So what is it expecting by way of authentication? Later on, I'd like to have the SUSE box retrieve and serve mail for three users on my home network, but for now there's just me, barely. I start Dovecot from su - root, since my regular user can't even see the command (that's how it was installed, and I figure YaST knows what it's doing). The process is definitely running. So, two things: Without configuring for any particular authent scheme (no LDAP, no certs), what is Dovecot serving, and to whom should it be willing to serve? If I prefer to handle everybody's mail from /data/<username>/Maildir/, rather than from ~/Maildir/, I think I can persuade Postfix to put it where I want. Does Dovecot need to be told where to look, or does one just put links in each user's home directory, pointing to the new /Maildir/ and Dovecot doesn't need to know? OK, three things... should Dovecot be given to "mail" or some other special-purpose system userid? Or should it remain the property of root? Kevin (at work, with a ton of unread mail at home... I think) The information contained in this electronic mail transmission may be privileged and confidential, and therefore, protected from disclosure. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting it from your computer without copying or disclosing it.